Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

The innate immune system has also developed ways of recognizing organisms, through pathogen-associated molecular patterns. That memory is instilled before birth and transmitted across generations. In other words, the innate immune system serves as a community resource. Having built up recognition mechanisms over eons, it establishes a transgenerati

The fifteenth century saw the simultaneous inauguration of European empire and the ascendency of a scientific worldview that objectified and diminished life and the natural world.

the immune response “is called into action by alarm signals from injured tissues, rather than by the recognition of nonself.”

colonialism isn’t simply the physical occupation of land. It is a process, an operation of power in which one cosmology is extinguished and replaced with another. In

If you find yourself more convinced by studying skeletal remains than by listening to the oral histories of Indigenous people, you’re a participant in a colonial system of organizing truth. Reconstructing history through bones misses much that oral histories capture. Yet in a colonial world, stories passed down by Indigenous elders cannot be consid

This close relationship between aging and inflammation has led to the clever neologism “inflamm-aging.”

Attempts to confer legal rights of personhood to Lake Erie were struck down by the courts, while laws that bestow on corporations the rights of people continue unchallenged. And there’s a reason: it’s easier to scoop the heart out of a mountain when it’s a resource than when it’s a living relative.

The “self” of immunology is more porous and fluid than the one in liberal political science, able to be shaped by social, economic, and political injustices. Matzinger herself wrote, “The immune system does not care about self and non-self[;] its primary driving force is the need to detect and protect against danger.”107 In other words, it is “more

Typically in septic shock, a person’s body sets off intense inflammation in response to an infection or trauma. Body temperature spikes to a fever to fight the offender. It can then plunge into hypothermia as the body fails to correct the